The presence in English of so many words from other languages is useful at times for Englishmen and Americans who are starting the study of other languages. There are so many words from French and Latin in the lexicon of English that we English speakers can learn French and Latin a little more easily than the speakers of many other languages.

This advantage is especially obvious in the case of the formal and educated vocabulary of these languages. The English words "adjudicate" and "anatomy," for example, are very similar to the Latin words "adjudicare" and "anatomia."

The Norman French had an important influence in prestigious cultural areas such as government, law, and the arts. Thus, today we have words like "pork," for meat from porcine animals prepared to be eaten, but "pig" and "swine" for the animals themselves. Instead of "pork" Germans say "Schweinfleisch." If English were a little more Germanic and a little less French, we ourselves would say "swineflesh."

For English speakers who study French, the most difficult part of its vocabulary appears in the initial phase of their studies. The words "bread," "water," and "fish" do not suggest their French forms, "pain," "eau," and "poisson," respectively.

But after learning this common vocabulary, we can read a rather easy text in a newspaper without much difficulty because words like "association," "opportunité," and "présent" are completely transparent to us. It is interesting to note that many students in Russia want to study Latin because its vocabulary is very useful for them when they start the study of English.

Unfortunately, the Romance vocabulary of English erects barriers to the study of German. Americans who have studied Spanish for a period of, let's say, two years find that they can read a Spanish newspaper rather easily.

But after a similar period of time studying German, we have difficulties with articles in publications like "Die Welt." Even if we can dominate conversational German after living for a year in Germany, we have difficulties with articles in publications such as "Der Spiegel" or "Stern" because the formal vocabulary in English is of Romance instead of Germanic origin.

Words such as "Brot," "Wasser," and "Fisch" are very similar to "bread," "water," and "fish," but words like "Verband," "Gegenwart," and "Gelangenheit" are completely opaque to English speakers the first time they find them in a text.

Because of our mixed vocabulary, there are no other languages that we can learn as easily as an Italian can learn Spanish or Portuguese or as a Dane can learn Swedish or Norwegian. These three languages are so similar that if Denmark, Sweden, and Norway were politically united in a single country, there would be only a single written form of continental Scandinavian, as you can see if you carefully examine the versions of these three languages in my electronic translation exercises.

In a similar way, Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa are similar. Dutch and German are only a little more different than these two African languages. The Serbs and the Bulgarians can communicate among themselves with a little effort. And for many people everywhere in the world, there are languages whose mastery would be essentially a process of getting used to a new version of their native languages, and a person who speaks Hindi, for example, would be able to learn quite easily Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, and a variety of other languages in India.